All Of The Important Dow Milestones In One Chart

As the Dow hits 20,000 for the first time, take a look back with this visual history of the index.

Yes, 20,000 is just a number — a big, round number — but hitting major milestones such as this one provides an opportunity to reflect, take stock and consider history. To that end, below is a visual history of the Dow and its important milestones, in one chart.

Investors may feel as though they waited forever for the Dow DJIA, +0.78% to at last reach 20,000. (Certainly we at MarketWatch, and the financial media in general, were impatiently beating the #Dow20K drum pretty much since the Dow hit 19,000 in late November.)

But clocking in at 42 trading sessions, the rally from 19,000 to 20,000 is the Dow’s second-fastest 1,000-point advance to a milestone level, since the 59-session span between late March and early July 2007. The fastest-ever 1,000-point rally was from 10,000 to 11,000 in early 1999 over 24 sessions. (See the full list of trading sessions between 1,000-point milestones here.)

With the market’s recent record-smashing velocity since Donald Trump won the presidential election, that history did not stop some on Wall Street from talking 21,000 before 20,000 was even in the books.